Another week, another attack on women's reproductive choices. The latest one comes, oddly enough, as a result of a New York University study about how popular magazines talk about celebrities of advanced maternal age and their kids. The report is getting picked up by the international media, from the BBC to The Times.

Titled "Age Is Just a Number:’ How Celebrity-Driven Magazines Misrepresent Fertility at Advanced Maternal Ages," the NYU report argues that magazines are misleading women into believing they, too, can get pregnant after 35 without any trouble and without having to use any fertility treatments—since their favorite celebrities are easily having kids well into their 40s. The report focuses on how three magazines—Cosmopolitan, US Weekly, and People—cover older celebrities' pregnancies and births, and faults those magazines for not mentioning whether those stars struggled to conceive or received any interventions.

The results of the media study are worth looking at, and it's always crucial to analyze the ways in which issues that impact women, celebrity or otherwise, are covered in the press. But the tone of this report is somewhat condescending, and oddly punitive-sounding for an academic study.

Presidential intrigues, climate catastrophes, high-level scandals everywhere we turn: Somehow no matter how explosive the headlines, they can't bump out spurious rumors about celebrity bumps. The "is she or isn't she pregnant?" stories are even more incessant when a celeb is in the no-spring-chicken category (exhibit A: The neverending baby-bump rumors that Jennifer Aniston has to deal with). Now the Internet is combusting over whether 47-year-old Gwen Stefani is or is not, or is about to get or not about to get, pregnant with Blake Shelton's baby.